by Evan the Unrelentless

20 posts from August 2006

August 31, 2006

This space beneath this overpass is lonely. Taxi drivers can catch a private catnap here, and blackmarket goods may be safely transferred from one vehicle to another.

On Tuesday I saw the remains of an entire mini-ATM behind the embankment. Someone had spirited the cash dispenser here to this gray zone. Pieces of the battered and sawed bank machine lay in a 10 foot radius, its core, a cashbox, was asunder, its contents long gone. By the next day, the whole thing had been cleaned up, no evidence of the crime remaining, not even a chalked outline of the ATM's lifeless corpse.

August 28, 2006

Classes at my new school started today. I'm teaching two periods of regents chemistry and two of regents biology.

In spite of my unorthodox job search I ended up getting a gig at a great school. My favorite things so far are: good colleagues hand-picked by an outstanding administrator, small classes (25 kids or less), video projectors in the science classrooms (I'm switching to all-Powerpoint this year), and kids who seemed very excited to be back in school despite the early timing.

On the down side my commute is about 60 minutes (2 trains and a 10 minute walk).

August 23, 2006

Her voice had the sweet gentleness we associate with our own mothers. And she was wearing a Muslim veil, Pakistani maybe. Her sons looked pleasant, eager to please their parents, excited to be traveling, nudging each other when I got on and stealing glances at my parcel [I was carrying a school desk from a dumpster]. The next time I looked at the semi-veiled woman she had nodded off. They were a family of four, very proper, very natural, looking a bit cautious, shy.

I don't know why they've come so far from their land. I do hope they have some money saved up. And a support network of friends. Are they like my own family? Is the dad safely employed? Are the sons fitting in at school? Has the relocation put a strain on the parentsmarriage? Will the grandparents be able to come visit the boys as they grow?

It's dangerous, seeing an up close example of The Other. One pleasant
sighting like this could erase hours of alarmist media coverage.

The Occident and Orient have famously misunderstood each other since well before Marco Polo. A book by Youssef Azghari describes potential sources for misunderstanding when West converses with East, citing several pitfalls you may encounter when talking to Arabs, Pakistanis, Turks, etc. The different choices of words may even make you feel like the other person intentionally misled you when actually it is because you are each using the language differently.

Specifically:1) there is a certain poeticizing tendency, emellishing what is bald and unpleasant.2) a desire to spare listeners by telling them what will not offend them3) an emphasis on intentions rather than results. Azghari's book, Culturally Determined Communication is in Dutch. I took this summary from an article in the SF Chronicle by Manfred Wolf.

I am amazed at how some Americans are almost spoiling for a racial confrontation with these people. A relative of mine, full of hate and fear, sent me a forwarded email that said this and ended with a plea to "Pass it on Fellow Americans". Very upsetting to get something like this sent to me by a relative. I think the more media one consumes, the more likely a person is to send that kind of email.

August 19, 2006

What an opportunity, the vaults of Hitsville opened and the master tapes accessible!

'Motown Remixed' is a 2005 release by producers that were given access to the original master tapes of the Jackson 5, Smokey Robinson, et al. How should we feel about the enshrined Motown canon being sliced diced, and re-imagined by Generation Y Young Turks? Let them at it, I say. Whatever they don't understand about our generation is repaid by our misunderstanding of theirs. In other words, the dialog is potentially compelling.

Anyway, the goal is not reverence.Re-imagining it is the goal. When furniture is re-finished, the new strategy can improve on the original. Motown is not a sacred dogma. As a general principle the things we love must never become fixed ideas. Great creations are not fragile. Let Plato's Republic take comic book form! Let JC star in Godspell or a Scorcese movie!

The only restriction on a Motown Remix should be making a product that ages as well as the original did, using legitimate, interesting ideas. This restriction still leaves room to take risks.

Some of the remixes suffer from faddish dj studio sampler sounds: did they really mean to add a “Rockit” scratch to Rare Earth?

The greatest moments are when the lovely original vocals are isolated and lifted out. I admit to a strong preference on to remixes where the original melody has been turned inside out (replay the melody in a minor key), subverted (tantalizing clipped here and there, a flowing mane buzzed to a short bob coiff), or entirely replaced, whole cloth (on ABC Michael Jackson now soars above a disorienting harpsichord riff). Rare Earth's I Just Want to Celebrate is slowed down, making each beat project into space, cantilevered beyond the place your expecting it to fall.

The Jackson 5 were never allowed to play their own instruments in the studio. I almost don't mind though, hearing a great Funk Bros session musician's guitar looping on "I Want You Back," sounding timeless like Sun Studios.

The drums + farafisa sound great on Heard it Through the Grapevine.

Papa Was a Rolling Stone, 35 years later, sounds like Eddie Hendricks is a lot less angry now -- the original vocals sounding almost wistfully nostalgic over the new aimless jam; the music now so mellow that it casts Papa more as a colorful Tomcatting tramp rather than the dangerous parasite and bitter disappointment that he was when we first met him in 1970. Diana Ross' world, however, still sounds every bit as empty. The music accompaniment gone 100% torch, rather than pop, but we somehow feel additional sadness for the grown up sounding Ms. Ross who is obviously still nursing the hurt of an adolescent breakup.

Several songs sound tired as if the producers ran out of time or ideas. "Just My Imagination" is a waste of space, seemingly unaltered, the producers out back in the alley smoking the production budget. But on the balance, a half dozen so-so efforts is not surprising.

The cumulative feeling here is that of a dream: you are revisiting a dead grandparent for a half hour or so; it's a very pleasant feeling.

The troubling thing about this record, enjoyable as it is, is that once a label does this, the master tapes get locked up again, maybe forever. "Oh a remix of our old Motown tapes? We already did that in 2006." As much as I like this album, the producers took a conservative tone in their creation. There are surely dozens of qualified hands out there. I wish this process could be re-done at will, over and over, whenever the muse strikes someone (rather than on-demand as it was here). I wish the acapellas would be released and find their hands into the Pet Shop Boys, Prince Paul, Dangermouse or whomever.

August 16, 2006

If a "sabot" jams and wrecks your machine, you can call it sabotage. So what to call it when a derailleur gets entrained along with the entering chain and wrecks your machine? Whatever the verb, I sadly report that my bike is totalled. The rear wheel locked up and I skidded for a few feet. As the knotted chain wrapped around my rear cassette I heard snapping noises. The derailleur was popped apart into three pieces as the chain carried it up and into the gears. It jerked the derailleur so hard that the device came out by the roots, bending the rear frame to the right about 1.5". Having gotten a year's worth of riding from this $120 used bike, I salvaged the chain (but left the beloved pedals) and abandoned the whole device far from my house on a playground in Fort Hamilton Brooklyn, beneath the Varrazanno Narrows Bridge. I then continued my 6 hour sweep of Brooklyn High Schools on foot and bus, dropping off about a resume per hour and discovering a 1766 Dutch Farmhouse on a sidestreet along the way.

I made a cursory scan of Google to see some other things that are kaput in this world. Many people had problems with electronic devices. Typically, blog entries applied the adjective kaput to:

"My cameraphone""My PS2""My right click button"

But other articles I found on the internet noted that these things were also kaput:"E3"Barry Bonds careerNuclear powercable news"my memory"the "Deltacom - NTC deal"DVD'sRick KaplanThe E.U."Grid Wars"Low Fat DietingThe Iraq WariBookEuropeThe Colonialism-Imperialism ParadigmTeen People Magazine

Nine stilted men led the big parade for Panama Day Saturday. They were followed by a raucous hundred-person marching band, 1/10 horns and 9/10 percussion.

My friend suggested that Panamanians should have a parade to commerate the anniversary of handing The Canal over. Instead, Panama Day commemorates the 1903 US invasion of the isthimus of Colombia. It seems that The Canal, a miracle of engineering, was preceded by a different miracle, where the United States Congress created an entire country out of thin air, converting the northern edge of Columbia into a country called Panama with the stroke of a pen (and a few thousand US Marines).

August 13, 2006

Hi Fi equipment sometimes comes with a frequency response range. For example, headphones may be rated for 20 beats to 16,000 beats per second. The upper ranges are totally irrelevant for my ears according to a web-based hearing test. Up to 14,100 Hz my ears heard clearly but the next two higher frequencies were iffy. 15,800 only registered as I rotated my head. Above that I heard nothing. This is normal for someone over 40. Teenagers should be able to hear higher frequencies than adults. Since people of various ages read this site, I would be curious to see your results versus your age. Try the link out and post the results here!